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Members of Generation Y are less likely to be bothered by income
inequality and more likely to want to get rich than their
parents’ were at the same age. But unlike young Baby Boomers,
Millennials
are less likely to plan a business career to achieve their goal.

Making money matters more to members of Generation Y than it did
to Baby Boomers at the same stage of life. According to the
“ American Freshman,” an annual report of
the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at UCLA,
which has been surveying entering college freshmen at U.S.
universities for nearly half a century, the fraction of
entering college students who believe that “being very well
off financially” is an “essential” or “very important”
objective increased from 58.2 percent in 1977 to 81.0 percent
in 2012.

As making money has become a more central goal of those entering
college, other objectives have become less important. Data
reported by the “American Freshmen” reveals that the fraction of
incoming college students who consider it “essential” or “very
important” to develop a “meaningful philosophy of life” declined
from 59.0 percent in 1977 to 45.6 percent in 2012.

Attending college is more instrumental to Millennials than it was
to Baby Boomers. Members of Generation Y are more likely than
their parents’ generation to report that they are going to
college because it will help them to make money. In 1977, 62.1
percent of incoming students said that a “very important” reason
they were going to college was “to be able to make more money.”
By 2012, that fraction had risen to 74.6 percent, the “American
Freshmen” reports.

Generation Y is also more politically conservative. Data from the
General Social Survey, a nationally representative sociological
survey administered by the National Opinion Research Center at
the University of Chicago and conducted annually since 1972,
shows that the fraction of people aged 18-30 who said they were
liberal was higher in 1977 than in 2012.

While the Millennials are more interested in getting rich than
Baby Boomers were at the same age, they have a different view
about how to get there. Members of Generation Y are less likely
to study business than were members of their parents’ generation.
The CIRP report reveals that the fraction of students intending
to major in business in 2012 was only two-thirds of that planning
to study the subject in 1977.

The Millennials also aren’t intending to work in business to the
extent their parents were. The CIRP study shows that the fraction
of incoming college students planning careers as accountants,
actuaries, business owners, executives, salespeople, or in other
business jobs, was 13.8 percent in 2012, down from 20.7 percent
in 1977.